Babbit eBook

He drove happily off toward the Bellevue district,
conscious of the presence of Mrs. Judique as of a
brilliant light on the horizon. The maple leaves
had fallen and they lined the gutters of the asphalted
streets. It was a day of pale gold and faded green,
tranquil and lingering. Babbitt was aware of
the meditative day, and of the barrenness of Bellevue—­blocks
of wooden houses, garages, little shops, weedy lots.
“Needs pepping up; needs the touch that people
like Mrs. Judique could give a place,” he ruminated,
as he rattled through the long, crude, airy streets.
The wind rose, enlivening, keen, and in a blaze of
well-being he came to the flat of Tanis Judique.

She was wearing, when she flutteringly admitted him,
a frock of black chiffon cut modestly round at the
base of her pretty throat. She seemed to him
immensely sophisticated. He glanced at the cretonnes
and colored prints in her living-room, and gurgled,
“Gosh, you’ve fixed the place nice!
Takes a clever woman to know how to make a home, all
right!”

“You really like it? I’m so glad!
But you’ve neglected me, scandalously.
You promised to come some time and learn to dance.”

Rather unsteadily, “Oh, but you didn’t
mean it seriously!”

“Perhaps not. But you might have tried!”

“Well, here I’ve come for my lesson, and
you might just as well prepare to have me stay for
supper!”

They both laughed in a manner which indicated that
of course he didn’t mean it.

“But first I guess I better look at that leak.”

She climbed with him to the flat roof of the apartment-house
a detached world of slatted wooden walks, clotheslines,
water-tank in a penthouse. He poked at things
with his toe, and sought to impress her by being learned
about copper gutters, the desirability of passing plumbing
pipes through a lead collar and sleeve and flashing
them with copper, and the advantages of cedar over
boiler-iron for roof-tanks.

“You have to know so much, in real estate!”
she admired.

He promised that the roof should be repaired within
two days. “Do you mind my ’phoning
from your apartment?” he asked.

“Heavens, no!”

He stood a moment at the coping, looking over a land
of hard little bungalows with abnormally large porches,
and new apartment-houses, small, but brave with variegated
brick walls and terra-cotta trimmings. Beyond
them was a hill with a gouge of yellow clay like a
vast wound. Behind every apartment-house, beside
each dwelling, were small garages. It was a world
of good little people, comfortable, industrious, credulous.

In the autumnal light the flat newness was mellowed,
and the air was a sun-tinted pool.

“Golly, it’s one fine afternoon.
You get a great view here, right up Tanner’s
Hill,” said Babbitt.

“Yes, isn’t it nice and open.”

“So darn few people appreciate a View.”

“Don’t you go raising my rent on that
account! Oh, that was naughty of me! I was
just teasing. Seriously though, there are so few
who respond—­who react to Views. I
mean—­they haven’t any feeling of poetry
and beauty.”